Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the "good of the universal church".

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Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment."

Several media outlets say the Vatican insists Pope Benedict is free from prosecution because he is a head of state.

"The Pope is certainly a head of state and he has the same legal status as all heads of state," Giuseppe Dalla Torre, the Vatican's tribunal chief, said this month.

But Mark Stephens, a lawyer for Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens, says only those with UN protection are safe.

"The Vatican is not recognised as a state in international law. People assume that it has existed for time immemorial but it was a construct of [Italian wartime leader Benito] Mussolini and, when the Vatican first applied to become a member of the UN, the US said no," Mr Stephens told The Guardian.

"[Fellow lawyer Geoffrey Robertson] and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature."

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The same law that could snare Pope Benedict was used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, on a Spanish warrant when he visited Britain in 1998.